4Bligs:

Oh, you must have A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, by Dana Reinhardt. It's about a girl who meets her birth mother, who turns out to be Jewish, and they go through several of the Jewish ceremonies together. It's a wonderful book in its own right, and a nice window into the Jewish holidays, too.

Didn't I add that? I liked the Jewish aspects of it very much. (A little similar to my own life; I wasn't adopted, but my mother rejected religion entirely, so I didn't learn anything about being Jewish until I was an adult.)

This is actually one of the poorer novels about contemporary Judaism and teenagers in recent years. The premise for it is deeply flawed, because practicing Jews just don't adopt their babies out to gentiles. That is why so many observant Jewish parents end up adopting babies from overseas or from gentile birth mothers, because there are no Jewish babies. How could the author have missed the fact that Simone ending up with her adoptive parents would have been impossible. I have yet to see a positive review of this novel from any practicing Jew. I myself am not Jewish, but I think we need to be sensitive in our stories to minority groups in our fiction for teens.